Social Media Strategy Review: Nescafe India

Introduction

A subsidiary of Nestle Switzerland, Nescafe is one of India’s oldest coffee brands – since 1963. In some parts of India, Nescafe is so popular that it is synonymous with Coffee.

Overall Strategy

The core essence of Nesccafe’s social media communication is about cementing its position as the drink that gets you started in the morning. Their tagline ‘Switch On The Best in You’ is the foundation of their social media updates.

Another part of their communication involves their brand ambassador – Deepika Padukone.

Very few brands have worked this extensively with their brand ambassdor on social media.

Platform-wise Strategy

Facebook

Boasting more than 2 million fans, the official page for Nescafe India goes by the name of Know Your Neighbors. Know Your Neighbors is the campaign Nescafe had kick-started in 2011 featuring Deepika Padukone and Purab Kohli in the TVCs.

Just like all brands, Nescafe is relying heavily on image updates as well. And why not? It is leading to a high engagement as well.

A healthy dose of Coffee art and Deepika Padukone have ensured a good engagement rate.

They have also used it as the primary platform to promote their new jingle that can also be downloaded as a ringtone.

As far as their use of Custom Tabs is concerned, I was a bit disappointed when I clicked on several of them only to be greeted with an attack page alert.

But my biggest peeve is how they organized their last few contests. They asked users to share the link of their jingle and tag friends with luck deciding the winner.

I find such campaigns non-innovative and spammy. It pisses people off when they are tagged with random videos.

Twitter

Can’t imagine a brand not utilizing the the power of twitter. More so when they have a good following of 1300+.

It seems their goal is to copy-paste 5 ‘coffee-is-a-great-stimulant’ tweets between 9 AM to 2 PM and nothing else.

There are no conversations. Apart from ‘regret’ tweets addressing complaints from contest winners who have not received their prizes even after 45 days!

I can’t understand why a brand will hold a contest on Twitter and not gratify their winners. It gives you a chance to make an entry to their friend network when they share photos of your prize on Facebook and Twitter.

And there are so many coffee lovers (several of them influencers) on Twitter that I am surprised Nescafe hasn’t reached out to them for conversations. A great window that is not opened yet.

YouTube

A fairly new channel (a little more than 1 month old), it is used as a repository to store their TVCs. It seems Indian brands are yet to figure out YouTube as a content delivery platform and not just a video dumping ground.

But yes, some of their latest videos have got some good number of views. Guess they were promoted with ads.

On an average each update gets 1 or 2 likes and an ocassional comment here and there. But we shouldn’t judge it by this miniscule reaction. Pinterest is evolving and Indians are taking up to it slowly.

And Nescafe is doing an impressive job at establishing their presence to capitalize on a likely Pinterest-explosion in India.

Nescafe’s Campaigns

Nescafe has been very active in promoting their Morning Bang jingle has extensively used social media to market it.

They held contests on Facebook and Twitter asking people to guess the number of times ‘Nescafe’ was mentioned in the jingle. While the campaign was good, Nescafe hasn’t dispatched the prizes to its winners yet.

A potential PR crisis in the waiting I would say.

After that, the campaigns have been mostly spammy in nature asking you to tag your friends in your updates. I sincerely hope they grow out of it.

Competitors on Social Media

Nescafe’s biggest competitor will be undoubtedly Bru. Both of these are the most consumed coffee brands in India.

But when it comes to social media, Nescafe is leagues ahead of Bru.

Bru has a fifth of Nescafe’s audience and an even poorer engagement rate. And part of it is to be blamed on its poor communication startegy. While it is using image updates just like Nescafe, they are just not attractive enough.

And when it comes to Twitter, Bru seriously needs to start Tweeting regularly. There’s so much potential left untapped over there.

Moreover, if I am Nescafe’s brand manager, I would be happy to know that Bru is not that active when it comes to running social media campaigns.

Comments on Strategy

Their strategy of resonating with youths and Deepika as the brand ambassador is working well for them. With a young following, they are doing a great job of keeping them enticed with interesting updates.

Also, it’s nice that they have integrated their TV campaign of ‘Know Your Neighbours’ with social media. It’s a nice way to bring people closer and making them become loyalists.

Feedback on The Strategy

While they do have a predominantly positive image, I would suggest that they start addressing the woes of their contest winners.

The twitter community is fairly vocal and you never know you, one day you will wake up to find yourself in a soup.

I would conclude the review by praising Nescafe’s efforts on Facebook and Pinterest but I honestly believe they can do so much more with Twitter and YouTube.

Comments

A digital marketing guy since 2008, I have helped several startups, SMBs and brands. Mad about analytics, data, social media and idli-sambhar. An engineer who fell in love with digital at the first sight. Follow my thoughts on Twitter at: @RakeshTheKumar